Venturethon: A Validation-First, Studio-Templated Pedagogical Model for Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

Abstract: This paper develops a conceptual framework for Venturethon, a sprint-based pedagogical model for entrepreneurship education centered on real-world business model validation. Its novelty is configurational rather than componential. Entrepreneurship education has shifted, over two decades, from lecture-based instruction toward experiential formats, yet a persistent gap remains between pedagogical methods and the authentic processes of new venture creation. Two competition-based formats dominate practice: hackathons, which compress innovation into 24 to 72 hours and rarely enable customer interaction; and business plan competitions, which reward written planning over market evidence. Recent empirical reviews show that lecture-centered teaching persists even where experiential intent is stated, and that participation in assessment-based startup competitions yields no significant entrepreneurial-intention advantage over controls. In parallel, a separate research stream — four randomized controlled trials covering 759 firms and a recent extension in Tanzania — has shown that a hypothesis-driven, theory-based approach to entrepreneurial decision making improves search efficiency and idea quality. The design challenge is therefore not whether validation matters, but how to embed it pedagogically. The Venturethon model rests on three theoretical pillars: experiential learning theory, hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship, and venture studio architecture. The paper specifies nine testable propositions linking program design features to expected learner outcomes and articulates four boundary conditions: deep-tech ventures with multi-year R&D timelines, regulated industries with constrained customer access, pre-undergraduate participants, and prior-MBA participants shown to resist hypothesis-driven methods. No existing format — hackathon, business plan competition, accelerator, I-Corps, or studio — jointly instantiates the translation of venture studio architecture (cohort parallelism, shared infrastructure, systematized process) into educational program design combined with open access, evidence-gated pedagogy, and pre-committed post-sprint pathways. The paper concludes with a quasi-experimental design for empirical evaluation against matched hackathon and business-plan-competition cohorts, inviting independent empirical testing.